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Simple circuits

Published on January 31, 2024   22 min

A selection of talks on Physiology & Anatomy

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0:00
Hi, I'm Dr. Angelina Fong, senior lecturer from the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. In this recording, we're going to cover simple circuits as part of the fundamentals of human physiology. You might be wondering what the circuits have to do with physiology. Let's find out.
0:24
Imagine that every action that you do, whether consciously or subconsciously, requires a circuit that takes the initiation or the sort and translates it into the final output. Whether you're going for a run or speaking or simply just swallowing, all of these actions that your body performs requires a circuit.
0:50
We need to have an initiator or trigger that will lead to an action or an effect. For this to happen, we must have an output part of the circuit that takes the information from the trigger to the action. Once we produce the action or the effect, there are often feedback mechanisms that will cause a reflex response to the initiator or the trigger to change what that trigger might be. There are names of these different parts of the circuit, called efferent for the output part and afferent for the input part. These are terms that we'll come back to in the future, but I just want to show you what these circuits might look like. Now, this is a very simple loop circuit. But what is involved in these circuits?